Mail Act-On: Invoke Mail.app rules with custom commands

If you’re using Tiger and Mail.app, you need to have a look at Mail Act-On, a free plugin developed by Scott Morrison and Jonathan Paisley that lets you assign keyboard commands that are bound to custom “Rules” you set in your Preferences. This is (very cleverly) accomplished by naming the rule according to the CTRL key you want to assign to it.

A simple, but elegant application I use constantly—I’ve created a rule called “Act-On: a | Archive” with this basic logic:

Move Message to: archived

Mark as Read

Stop evaluating rules

So I can select a bunch of already-read messages in my inbox, hit CTRL-a, and it silently shunts the old mail off to the archive without dragging. Done.

Scott points out that—with a logical mind and a bit of creativity—you can do all sorts of cool tricks—including using the same key for different commands based on context. My favorite trick is to just hit “`” (reassignable to the meta key of your choice), which brings up a bezel showing all possible commands for the selected messages.

If you were a fan of Aaron’s “Mail.app Mutt Scripts” for Panther, you should definitely check out Mail Act-On. Really wonderful little plugin and a huge time-saver.

If you are using Linux, you can do this in KMail (and the PIM which uses KMail, Kontact). Use "Settings, Configure Filters" and assign a keyboard shortcut to any filter you create (which can have as many rules and actions as you want). Spiffy!

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